Messages

46

Quake / Re: TS.Net Forum and Servers Maintenance 8/24

« on: August 24, 2021, 07:13:22 AM »

*sensible concern*

*unsurprising disappointing hypocrisy and chronically unpunished agitation*

*sensible concern but in a refreshingly brief form*

Take it easy and settle down, i have a private interest in one of the servers, don't make a fuss about it.

Which server? I'll make sure it gets restarted. PM me if necessary. There are currently 55 Q2 Tastyspleen.net servers plus the ones hosted here on other user accounts.

47

Quake / Re: TS.Net Forum and Servers Maintenance 8/24

« on: August 24, 2021, 06:29:06 AM »

Who is Saxon? Someone who was banned previously and came back with a new name? Call me crazy, but I tend to immediately distrust someone with a month old account who suggests granting full pardons to the trolls and shitheads who have played their part long and hard enough to earn a ban.

I agree.

48

Quake / Re: TS.Net Forum and Servers Maintenance 8/24

« on: August 24, 2021, 06:05:48 AM »

This server has been up for 827 days. I'm hoping quadz had most services set to auto start, but who knows. I guess we'll see tomorrow...

Lol, you may have a slight problem there, maybe you should have an amnesty clearing of your tastyspleentv discord blocklist if reading updates on this are actually a thing.

Why? Anyone blocked from the boards or channels doesn't need to know. This is a maintenance action and doesn't concern them.

49

tastyspleen.net / Re: TS500 2021 Edition

« on: July 19, 2021, 11:06:42 AM »

It's there. I invoked it on the server to test. We have control.

50

tastyspleen.net / Re: TS500 2021 Edition

« on: July 19, 2021, 10:06:24 AM »

Sounds like a plan. It should be simple enough to set up rcon.

51

Quake / Re: Last ditch hair brain idea

« on: July 15, 2021, 05:38:37 PM »

@qwazy does this site also run  off of that same machine or is it run by a different entity? may be a silly question but i thought id ask you anyways being that you are fairly tech savvy

It's all run off the same machine.

52

Quake / Re: Last ditch hair brain idea

« on: July 13, 2021, 05:02:08 PM »

I suppose the prices were higher back when it was first initiated and it was a better spec machine back in the day. I know he was overpaying for the old one and this one was a great improvement in performance.

It would have been selected 4 or 5 years ago I believe. Spec sheet on the E5-2630 v4 says 10 cores, 20 threads so lets end the speculation.

cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 79
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v4 @ 2.20GHz
stepping        : 1
microcode       : 0xb00001b
cpu MHz         : 1200.170
cache size      : 25600 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 20
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 10
apicid          : 0
initial apicid  : 0
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 20
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 sdbg fma cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid dca sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm abm 3dnowprefetch epb invpcid_single kaiser tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase tsc_adjust bmi1 hle avx2 smep bmi2 erms invpcid rtm cqm rdseed adx smap intel_pt xsaveopt cqm_llc cqm_occup_llc cqm_mbm_total cqm_mbm_local dtherm ida arat pln pts hwp
bugs            : cpu_meltdown spectre_v1 spectre_v2 spec_store_bypass l1tf mds
bogomips        : 4399.78
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 46 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

Etc. up to 11. It enumerates CPU 0 thru 11 so I don't know WTF that means if it's a 10 core.

By today's standards it's a medium capability processor. Personally, I used to be an Intel guy but now I have experienced a 16 core Ryzen 9 and would not go back to Intel.

Given its uptime at 786 days, I'd have to say it was a good choice of vendor because they are not foisting updates on it and it was self-managed by quadz. It's not shared with anyone and it's a real box not a virtual one.

As for downsizing or paring down the server count, that will be up to the next owner.
To quote quadz, "I can run 100 empty servers as easily as 10." or words to that effect.

53

Quake / Re: Last ditch hair brain idea

« on: July 13, 2021, 10:04:00 AM »

The entire server is a 12-core Intel CPU machine with 64GB ram and a 1TB disk.
It's about 81% full. It's a full, bare metal dedicated server and they're pricy.

I have backed up the quake2 content which is about the only content I can access outside of my shell to a backup server with the help of Claire. Total content was about 9.8GB but total size was 17.3GB so even within that quake2 folder there was inaccessible content. We're working on the backup issues from inside the server now.

I recommend someone with abundant storage capacity try using wget to download all the web content.
There are a lot of folders that are op-critical that nobody has access to at the moment.

It's an expensive server. Not your usual $24.95/month web presence.

If people have $20 to spend on a lottery ticket every month on the snowballs-chance of a win then they can afford to pay that $20 to directly supporting the server. A lottery win would produce more problems than it solves, like who's going to keep and manage the money that "the users" won?

For the time being we need to stand by and formulate a plan and let the family grieve. After a month or two we can approach the widow about transfer of ownership but there are certain files on Quadz' PC that we need for root access unless another method is found. For the time being I intend to respect the property rights of his family.

54

Trouble Shooting / Re: Trying to access my old forum account

« on: July 12, 2021, 09:56:19 AM »

The profile definitely exists but that ^ in the name might be making it invalid on the login name filter.

http://forum.tastyspleen.net/quake/index.php?action=profile;u=217

55

Trouble Shooting / Re: Trying to access my old forum account

« on: July 12, 2021, 07:11:55 AM »

If you still have access to and can remember your email address you used to create the account you might try  to recover/change your password. I don't know any other way unless there is a forums admin who can force a password reset or change it for you.

Attachments and other options is the method for inserting a picture.

56

Quake / Re: Quadz, the Loquaciously Multiloquent Member

« on: July 12, 2021, 07:08:20 AM »

My condolences to his family.
I am still reeling from this news. Tastyspleen has been the nucleus of the Q2 community and Quadz was the nuclear force that kept it together. Wallfly was an important part of that. I never met quadz but we collaborated on some things and he was always helpful. One never thinks of mortality and when it hits it's always unexpected.

57

Trouble Shooting / Re: Q2pro = spyware?

« on: July 11, 2021, 06:16:52 PM »

There's no automatic update or update tool for q2pro. You have to explicitly go to the web site and download the latest build.

58

Trouble Shooting / Re: Q2pro = spyware?

« on: July 10, 2021, 09:59:02 PM »

FUD.
If data is encrypted then one can't say anything about the contents of the data.
"Discloses IP address." Well, yeah, that's kind of built into the protocol, isn't it?
"Base-64 or Hex." Duh, those are encoding techniques, not encryption techniques.
I'm uncertain about the grammar in this context, is he saying it uses both or that base-64 is interchangeable with hex? Wireshark displays bytes as hex. Also ASCII.
"It phones home." What IP address is home?
Q2PRO and all the advanced clients now talk to q2servers.com for the list of active servers.
They also immediately send status requests to each of the available servers to get ping estimates and the status blocks of the servers.
On Anticheat enabled servers the clients send certain data to the server about the hashes of the game files per a list supplied by that particular server. They don't send file lists. It's the same for R1Q2. Was this checking performed on such a server?

59

Trouble Shooting / Re: Bandwidth

« on: May 31, 2021, 01:00:02 PM »

With wireless the primary cause of jitter is co-channel interference on the WiFi link. Your kids video streams compete for the right to transmit and receive. The contention can cause dropped frames and lag of real-time streams like the Q2 protocol. The same thing applies to the radio channel connecting your tether device to the WAN, LTE, 5G etc., all suffer from the same problem. Geography also matters. Larger cells suffer from more traffic and contention. Your gaming life will suck for a while but it won't be because of texture detail.

Yeah, I thought that seemed kinda whacked about textures and bandwidth.  I think losing the gun model, footsteps, and even gibs (q2pro) saves a bit but at 20 kbps t'aint gonna matter. My connection's been okay, faster than my wired one in fact, but there are moments or hiccups every so often. The problem is after 15 gb of data, they kick it down to 2 Mbps till the next cycle. Anyhow, t'will just be me on this tether, kids are gone now (for now) - guess I am dating myself here...heehee. And if it doesn't suck so bad I may just stay wireless after summer is over. Again, thanks for the replies.

Cheers,

That 20kbps is only the server-client protocol needed for tracking the player movement and actions. Those are the frames that the server sends to tell the client what's happening inside the map and for the client to send your player movement, line of sight and shots. Graphic objects, maps and sounds are not sent except at client connect or intermissions. Those downloads can be from the server or from the http redirect servers. They consume more bandwidth and go much faster than 20kbps (That's 20 kilobits per second, not bytes) Quake 2 protocol was very economical because it was invented when modems were the dominant life-form on the planet.

The client is presenting you with a view of the map based on your client information and a bunch of numbers from the server. The server communicates the positions and movements of the other players but there is no concern about content like sounds and graphics, those are all computed internally in your client. The view you see and hear all comes from the client code and the maps and models on your disk, nothing like that flows between client and server while the game is played.

20kbps is an average rate, assuming you already have all the entities, maps, skins and sounds on your client. If you are already an established player then downloads will be rare and your gaming bandwidth consumption will be minimal. At an average of 20kbps it will take you 7,500,000 seconds to transfer 15GB of data (1.5x10^11 bits of data / 20,000 bits per second). That's 2083 hours of playing. If you're hitting the 15GB limit it's not from playing Quake 2.

60

/dev/random / Re: UFO SPACECRAFT CONFIRMED BY USA

« on: May 31, 2021, 12:36:00 PM »

It was not my intent to address pilot observations. Only the radar tracking and the physics of radar.